Erkrath

Erkrath is situated on the river Düssel, directly east of Düsseldorf and west of Wuppertal, close to the famous Neandertal. It has two stations, Erkrath station, which is served by Rhine-Ruhr S-Bahn line S 8, and Erkrath Nord station, which is served by S-Bahn line S 28, both at 20-minute intervals.

In that part of Neandertal, which is located in Erkrath, in the summer of 1856, quarry workers discovered the fossilised remains of what became known as the Neanderthal man or Homo neanderthalensis in Feldhof cave. The name Erkrath was first mentioned in 1148. Erkrath received town rights in 1966. In 1975, the municipality of Hochdahl was incorporated into Erkrath. As well its former borough Unterbach was incorporated into Düsseldorf. Only a part of Unterbach called Unterfeldhaus remained as now a borough of its own with Erkrath. Erkrath today has three local parts: Erkrath, Hochdahl and Unterfeldhaus.

^[3]

• Johann Kaiser (1898–1907) (the old town hall was built in 1899)
• Franz Zahren (1907–1930)
• Werner Hallauer (1930–1935)
• Heinrich Rasche (1935–1945), NSDAP, later FDP
• Wilhelm Broch (1945–1946)
• August Westerholz (1946), SPD
• Hermann Moritz (1946–1949), CDU
• Alex Bendt (1949–1954), SPD
• Gertrud Thomé (later: Küpper) (1954–1956), CDU
• Alex Bendt (1956–1961), SPD
• Gertrud Küpper (geb. Thomé) (1961–1963), CDU
• Johannes van Oost (1963–1964),
• Gertrud Küpper (geb. Thomé) (1964–1972), CDU
• Hans Weyer (1972–1974), SPD
• Aloys Kiefer (1975–1983), CDU
• Gloria Ziller (1983–1989), CDU
• Rudolf Unger (1989–1999), SPD
• Arno Werner (1999–2015), CDU
• Christoph Schultz (since 2015), CDU^[4]

• 
  Heilig-Geist-Kirche (Erkrath)
• 
  Neanderkirche (Erkrath)

Erkrath is twinned with:^[5]

• West Lancashire, England, United Kingdom^[6]
• Columbia, Maryland, United States^[7]

Erkrath's twin town partnership with Cergy-Pontoise, France was dissolved in 2019.^[8]